


Grow Better

by bastet_in_april, OuidaMForeman



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: A bit of both for good measure, Apples, Aziraphale and Crowley Through The Ages (Good Omens), Book Omens, Botany, Community: Do It With Style Events, Crowley's Plants (Good Omens), Do It With Style Good Omens Reverse Bang, Historical Accuracy, Historical Inaccuracy, Historical References, I just really love plants, M/M, Medicine, Mesopotamia, Nineveh, Other, Poisons, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), Sumerian beer, Theophrastus, Victorian floriography, and secretly so does Crowley, in nineveh, orchid mania, the hanging gardens of babylon, the neolithic revolution
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-16 01:41:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29324130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastet_in_april/pseuds/bastet_in_april, https://archiveofourown.org/users/OuidaMForeman/pseuds/OuidaMForeman
Summary: Crowley's changing relationship with plants, humanity, and the Angel of the Eastern Gate, from the Garden of Eden to a cottage in the South Downs.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13
Collections: Do It With Style Good Omens Reverse Bang





	1. Ur

**Author's Note:**

> A collaboration between Ouida and Ditherwings for the Good Omens Reverse Bang 2021. (Thank you, Ouida! You inspire me endlessly. I am so glad that I got to work with you on this!) Check out Ouida's stunning art here: https://ouidasart.tumblr.com/post/642699454519148544/my-art-for-the-first-chapter-of-grow-better-the and here: https://ouidasart.tumblr.com/post/642700946707824640/more-art-for-chapter-one-of-my-and-ditherwings

In Eden, everything had grown perfectly.

It had never rained, not until the day the humans had been expelled from the Garden, but every plant had been lush and green, somehow managing to both bloom and fruit simultaneously, all out of season. There hadn’t _been_ seasons yet. Eden had no ecosystem, or it had every ecosystem, cacti and cattails growing side by side. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil had been magnificent and impossible, but no more magnificent and impossible than any of the other things that grew in the Garden.

Then Crawly had gone up there and caused some trouble, and the humans had been cast out like two dandelion seeds adrift in the wind. Seeds don’t choose where they fall. They are cast down, and must learn to grow and thrive, putting out roots whether the soil is fertile or inhospitable.

The land outside of Eden seemed wild and strange, barren in comparison to the Garden but not bare. The plants that grew there seemed drab, thorny, and stunted. They offered little cover from the cold rain as Crawly slithered through the underbrush, following the distant flicker of firelight in the dark. He wondered absently whether the angel who had given the humans his sword was out here in the dark, as well, stumbling over tree roots in the dark or attempting to fly through this wretched storm. Crawly wondered if they would ever see one another again, and then put the thought out of his mind. Rain splashed into Crawly’s yellow eyes, and he hissed menacingly at the viciously spiny little acacia tree above him, “Where are your leaves, you pathetic excuse for a shrub? I’ve seen cocktail umbrellas that kept off the rain better!(1) Is this really the best you can achieve?” Crawly’s eyes flashed menacingly in the dark. “Or do I need to _motivate_ you?”

Thunder crashed. The acacia tree quivered faintly. It thought very hard about acquiring protection from malicious demons. (2) Crawly, wet and miserable, failed to notice.

***

The grass made a quiet cave where Luluwa could hide from the sun, and from her brothers, who were fighting again. Cain and Abel were always fighting about something. Today, they were fighting over who had forgotten to tie the goat securely the night before. It had gotten away from where they had camped for the season, meandering about aimlessly in search of choice grasses, until their mother Eve had managed to coax it back with a handful of lentils. Luluwa rolled her eyes upwards, towards the cloudless blue sky and sighed. Brothers were tiresome, and hers were also idiots. Here in this little cave she had made, the wild millet grass reaching above her head, the yelling was distant to the point of being nearly inaudible. Everything was green and cool. The blades of wild millet leaves blocked out the world. Luluwa ran her fingers along the length of one; it was sturdier than it looked and almost sharp at the edge, like her father’s sword. The stalk of the plant was sturdier still, supporting a starburst of seeds that arced from its end like a tiny shower of yellowish green. Luluwa tugged at the seeds and they came off in her hand. She put the handful of little pearls onto her tongue, chewing. She liked millet better when it was toasted on a hot stone, but it was filling and tasted a little bit like nuts and a lot like the greenness of plants. 

Luluwa’s other hand trailed idly along the dirt, still cool, if no longer damp, from the rain a few days ago. It had come late in the season, and her father and mother had debated in low voices over whether it meant a short fallow season, or a long one. If it meant a long one, the family would have a lot of traveling ahead of them as they foraged for scarce food. 

It would be so much easier, Luluwa thought, if there was a way to take the food with them, the way they took the goat that gave them milk, herded along the same path they traveled. But they couldn’t carry a field of grain with them, or coax it to follow their path. Luluwa poked the base of a millet stalk moodily, prodding the point in the ground where roots sprouted to anchor it in place. It wouldn’t be doing any walking. Luluwa dug her brown fingers into the soil.

Half-buried under the plant’s root structure was the tiny pearl of a millet seed, swallowed by the recent rainfall. A tiny green shoot had broken through the seed casing and, below, a tiny thread of white roots was beginning to spin itself. All of that, in something so small that she could carry dozens and dozens in her palm.

Luluwa looked at the furrows she had dug in the ground with her fingers and gently poked a few millet seeds into the soil, smoothing it over. It was quiescent, mysterious. Seeds tried to grow where they fell. These, she had cast down to the earth at her whim. Their fate remained to be seen.

Cain and Abel were still yelling somewhere in the distance. Luluwa filled her pockets with yellow millet seeds, and thought about carrying a field of grain with her wherever she went.

***

It looked like a bunch of sticks tied together. One of the sticks had a stone tied to it.

“It looks like a bunch of sticks tied together,” Crowley told the farmer skeptically. He had met Eshkar while stirring up resentment among the stone-hauling crews working on Ur’s ziggurats. Eshkar had been selling his produce to the hungry work crews, and had hastily pulled Crowley into the shadows of his stall and out of range of an outbreak of flying fists and elbows as his temptation succeeded a bit _too_ well. Crowley had made a point to visit the man’s farm whenever he was in Ur ever since.

Eshkar rolled his eyes, but patiently explained. “It’s an ard plough. This bit is the yoke--it’s easier to have animals pull it than to try to manage it, yourself--and it connects to the draft pole. The sharp stone at the end of the share tills the earth, cutting through it. Can you imagine having to dig an individual hole for each seed, even with a stick?” Eshkar scoffed. “The ard can even be used to cover the seed up again with earth once it’s been sowed! No, this is the way of the future. _Much_ less laborious.”

Crowley looked at the ard and shrugged. “If you say so.”

Privately, Crowley was of the opinion that nothing about agriculture was less laborious than nomadic pastoral life. You weren’t traveling for miles, but when the trade-off was long hours bent over in a field, at the mercy of the mercurial weather… and if your seed failed to sprout or your plants died before fruiting, you couldn’t just uproot yourself and go searching for a new source of food. The humans had planted themselves as surely as they had planted their grain. Crowley couldn’t decide if it was madness or stubbornness, but he found himself half-admiring it.

“You come out into the fields and help, tomorrow. You’ll see.” Eshkar clapped Crowley on the shoulder. “It’s the least you can do in return for drinking up all of my beer.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Crowley laughed, and shrugged.

***

Crowley could kind of see the advantage of the ard plough, now. It quickly cut ribbon-like furrows into the earth, making what would have been the work of many days into a much shorter exercise. 

Crowley was walking well behind the plough, because Eshkar’s oxen were evil beasts, and like Crowley about as much as he liked them, but were far more likely to express that displeasure with their teeth. Eshkar’s wife, Lillan, and his daughter, Kirashi, walked behind the plough, as well, sowing saved barley seeds into the churned earth as they followed it.

“Here,” Lillan said, thrusting a small woven basket of seed into Crowley’s hands. “It’s simple enough. I’d tell you to be careful not to let the wind catch the seed, but there is no wind today.” It was true. The sun was high in a pale blue sky, and the air was dry and still.

Lillan sowed seed uniformly, her movements practiced and economical. Her barley seed formed perfect even rows, ordered and regimented. Like the serried ranks of angels, each in their orderly sphere.

Crowley shook the thought off. Kirashi sowed her barley seed like she was scattering stars across the firmament, artfully, to a design so grand and abstract that no one else could comprehend it, and with all the chaotic exuberance and restraint of a nine year old.

Crowley reached into the basket and grabbed a handful of barley seeds. They felt like tiny beads against the skin of his palm. He let the seeds slip through his fingers to the earth, falling in a cascade. Slowly, and then very fast.

When Eshkar’s ard-plough turned the earth back over the furrows, it was as if the seeds had never been there at all. They waited underground, in the dark, until they dared to reach for the sun.

***

The next time Crowley visited Eshkar was harvest season. The barley had grown tall, and was golden in the light of the sun, shifting like an ocean as the wind swept over it, making heavy heads of grain bow in waves. The irrigation canals cut into the edges of the field looked like broad veins of silver in the bright sunlight. 

Harvest was not an easier task than planting, but the breeze kept Crowley’s long hair from sticking to the sweat collecting at the nape of his neck, and there was something satisfying about collecting the process of gathering barley seeds into a basket to dry and keep for next season’s planting. Eshkar and Lillan were threshing the grain for eating, collecting far more than Crowley’s basketful, carrying heavy sacks of unhulled barley to where Kirashi was managing the oxen who would carry the load back to the family’s home. Much more grain was collected than Crowley remembered being planted the previous year. That was the advantage of agriculture, he supposed. A vast orderly field of barley, uninterrupted by the presence of weeds or inedible plants was not a thing you could find in nature. Eden, for all of its lush vibrancy, hadn’t been like this; it had been populated by plants that would never have been able to grow in the same soil type or climate on earth, all pressed up against one another. Plants wouldn’t just behave like that on earth, so humans _made_ them behave, coaxing and coercing barley to grow in dry soil by irrigating it, by sowing seed in ways that chance and luck never would have. Humans didn’t have divine grace, cast out of the Garden as they had been. They had stubbornness, creativity, and imagination.

***

Crowley was heading towards the city center, arms full of a massive clay vessel of beer, when he saw a familiar head of silvery hair seated on a low wall next to an outdoor food vendor’s stall. 

“Aziraphale!” Crowley sat down on the wall, easing the jug out of his arms and into his lap. Aziraphale startled, having been absorbed in the tablet he was reading, neatly inscribed with triangular shapes cut into it with a reed stylus. The hand not holding the tablet was holding a piece of flatbread wrapped into a kind of case for grilled fish, onions, and greens. “Funny thing, running into you perched on another wall!”

Aziraphale looked a bit nervous, but he didn’t seem angry or dismayed to see Crowley. If anything, he looked a bit annoyed to have his reading interrupted. “Crowley. What brings you to Ur? Nothing good, I imagine?”

Crowley shrugged easily. “Eh. Great thing about cities is that I don’t have to work very hard to stir up trouble. All these people packed into closer quarters than before, fighting over space, resources, status… Don’t get me started on class hierarchies. That was definitely one of ours.” Crowley paused, tilting his head as he reconsidered. “Possibly. Then again, I remember how tetchy Heaven got about one’s proper rank, order, and sphere…” He shook his head. “Really, though, I’m in town to visit an old friend. Promised I’d help with the barley harvest.”

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t give me that look. It was purely selfish. Lillan makes the best beer in the city.” Crowley lifted the jug in demonstration. “Besides, you shouldn’t be criticising. For all you know, the barley in that flatbread you’re eating is some of the stuff I planted earlier in the year.”

Aziraphale considered the grilled flatbread, still hot from being cooked under ash on a hot stone, with new interest. “I didn’t know you had such an interest in farming.”

Crowley glanced away from Aziraphale’s too-keen gaze, looking out over the city of Ur instead. “I’m not, really,” he told the angel. “It’s just,” he waved a hand at the buildings, streets packed with animals and people on their way to the marketplace, the stepped stone edifices of the ziggurats, and the orderly expanses of green fields stretching into the distance. “Hard to believe all of this came of humans learning how to grow plants better. Living in one place, class hierarchies, permanent architecture, that writing that you’re so fond of…” Aziraphale clutched the tablet protectively. “And alcohol.” Crowley waggled the jug of beer at Aziraphale, listening to it slosh slightly within the confines of the clay vessel.

“I’ve never tried it. Is it any good?”

“You’ve never tried beer?” Crowley was incredulous. His eyes fell to the flatbread with the filling of fish and vegetables. 

“It always just looked… porridgey,” Aziraphale told him. “Besides, I’m an angel. It’s not as if drinking the water will make me sick. Or as if I need to drink anything at all.”

“No, come on, angel,” Crowley said. “You’ve got to try it at least once. For me?” He looked beseechingly at Aziraphale, his amber eyes wide. “I helped make this beer. Worked really hard on it, roasted the barley for malting myself. Lillan made the bappir--said she didn’t trust someone inexperienced to get it right--but that’s beside the point. You wouldn’t turn down the hospitality of a demon offering to share something he made through the sweat of his own brow, would you?”

Aziraphale caved under Crowley’s wheedling like an unfired pot. “Oh, all right, go on then. There had better not be actual sweat in this, though.”

Crowley grinned, pulling a large clay bowl out of a bag that was certainly too small to have actually contained it, followed by a pair of straws. “Nah. I don’t think demons sweat, actually.” 

He poured the beer out of the jug. The spout had holes in it like a colander, straining the liquid as it was poured. It still looked a bit...porridgey… when it had settled into the bowl, cloudy with the dissolved and fermented bappir and containing fragments of grain too small to be strained out. It smelled sweet and yeasty, as well as a bit like honey and dates.

“Here,” Crowley handed Aziraphale a straw. “These help. They’re narrow enough to keep you from swallowing any grains. So it’s not… chewy.” He put his own straw in the bowl, and took a long pull from the drink in demonstration. “Go on then,” he gestured for Aziraphale to add his own straw to the vessel. Hesitantly, Aziraphale did so, and took a drink.

It wasn’t chewy. It both was, and was not, like bread. The beer was smooth and rich, nutty and malty from the barley. The fermented yeastiness of it gave a sharp tang of sourness, balanced out by the addition of honey and date syrup. The addition of bappir--beer bread--in the brewing made the drink creamy and rich. 

Crowley watched Aziraphale’s face as he tried the drink, the angel’s expression transforming from wary suspicion to startled pleasure. Crowley had done that, put that look of surprise and delight onto Aziraphale’s face. A strange, fierce sort of warmth filled Crowley at the realization. He cleared his throat. “Good?”

“This is marvellous!” Aziraphale smiled at him, clay tablet and meal forgotten in favor of the bowl of beer. 

They drained it together, and when their faces bent closely together over the shared bowl, as they both took pulls of the drink through their straws, Crowley found himself paying more attention to the way Aziraphale’s eyes creased at the corners with pleasure than to the beer.

***

1) He hadn’t, any more than he had ever seen a lead balloon, but that wasn’t about to stop Crawly from saying so.  
2) In fact, the acacia would acquire an army of bodyguards in the form of a colony of ants that would live in hollow spaces in its thorns and swarm to bite any predators or angry demons who menaced it. Isn’t evolution remarkable?


	2. The Hanging Gardens of Nineveh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out Ouida's beautiful art for Chapter 2 here: https://ouidasart.tumblr.com/post/643377545421750273/my-art-for-chapter-2-of-me-and-ditherwings. Crowley's expression is amazing!

***

**Nineveh**

Crowley understood that his approach to temptation was considered somewhat unorthodox by his colleagues in Hell. Crowley was a big picture sort of demon; he didn’t see the point in hanging about to torment one unlucky human with temptations, doubt, and poor impulse-control for decades at a time, when he could be taking a simple series of actions that would lead to small bad decisions and general nastiness from hundreds of humans at a time for decades. Why waste your time blackening just one soul thoroughly, when you could spread just a bit of tarnish to a lot of them at once? Crowley was a demon who could appreciate a large-scale project.

However, Crowley was also a demon whose bicentennial review was coming up, and his superiors tended to appreciate more traditional work. 

With that in mind, Crowley had quietly incorporated himself into the royal household staff of King Sennacherib.(1) He had quickly made himself indispensable to Zakutu--Naqi’a to her friends--one of the royal wives. He became a listening ear for all of her frustrations, and an encouraging friend. A friend who was quick to point out how much better off the kingdom would be if it were Naqi’a and her son, Esarhaddon, making decisions about the future, and not the insipid crown prince, Arda-Mulissu, who had simply been appointed based on his position as eldest son. Surely Sennacherib would listen to his beautiful and intelligent queen, Crowley pointed out, as he carefully applied kohl to her eyelids with a delicate ivory spoon. She should plead her case; she could talk the King around to her perspective. The way to get the King to consider it, Crowley added, laying out jars of cedar and myrtle perfume for Naqi’a, was to get Sennacherib to think about his own legacy. What was the point of Sennacherib creating a palace without a rival that would endure as his legacy, when he chose the lesser prince, whose rival surpassed him, as the future of his kingdom?

Naqi’a had pressed her case, and Prince Arda-Mulissu began to look increasingly resentful as his father heaped new privileges on his younger brother Esarhaddon. Jealousy, resentment, and sibling rivalry. It was a classic.

It also came with the side bonus of increased access to King Sennacherib, as Naqi’a and her son became more esteemed and powerful within the royal circle. Queen Tashmetu-Sherratt was no longer the one hanging off of Sennacherib’s arm during royal banquets, flattering him and laughing obliging at his jokes. Now she sat further down the table, shooting daggers at her rival with her beautiful brown eyes, while Crowley poured wine for the royal couple. It left Crowley perfectly placed to make a few carefully worded suggestions to the king, himself.

The opportunity came after a visit from an Elamite dignitary. The man’s face was pinched with bitterness as he bowed to the King, offering a carefully flowery greeting. His spine had a marked curve, the remnants of a childhood case of rickets that had kept him out of military service in the terrible war that Elam and Babylon had lost to the Assyrian kingdom. That lack of a military career had kept the man alive and in a position of administrative power after Sennacherib had ordered the complete destruction of the city of Babylon.

Crowley’s sharp eyes followed the dignitary carefully. This was a man who hated Sennacherib with every fiber of his mortal heart.

During the third course of the dinner--roasted gazelle with coriander and spices--the King turned discussion to the palace. “You must tell me what you think of it!” The King insisted, excitedly. “I call it a palace without rival. There has never been a royal residence more impressive, I am certain of it. I moved the capital to Nineveh, and I began to build this wonder here. The walls are taller than one hundred and fifty bricks stacked on top of one another.” Sennacherib looked delighted with himself, his teeth flashing brightly in his neatly curled beard. “You have traveled to many cities as an ambassador. Have you ever seen its equal?”

The ambassador’s eyes flashed, and he smiled politely. “Oh, no. It’s certainly taller and broader than any palace I have ever seen,” he replied. “No one could argue that there is any structure bigger. And the design! So… practical. It’s certainly very... utilitarian.”

“Utilitarian?” 

“Oh, yes! Industrial, even. All those… plain bricks and undecorated limestone blocks. You have such a pragmatic approach to building projects, your majesty. One can’t help but respect your single-mindedly straightforward vision as an architect.”

Never had someone so politely and diplomatically called a palace ugly. Sennacherib looked like he had bitten into a lemon. Crowley had to smother a laugh under a cough. He hastily refilled Naqi’a’s goblet when she shot him a sharp look.

Thankfully, the next course arrived to divert the conversation. It was a yogurt-based soup served with bulgur wheat. The visiting Elamite exclaimed politely over the dish.

“Oh, this looks delicious! I’m so relieved to see that your wheat crop has been good.” The diplomat stirred some of the bulgur into his soup, and tore a bit of bread from a loaf to dip into it.

“Yes, of course.” Sennacherib looked puzzled. “Why would it not have been?”

The diplomat laughed embarrassedly. “Oh, just a silly rumor I heard. Something about a plague of vermin. Someone told me that your attack on Jerusalem was miraculously halted because your men were chased from the city by a horde of mice that devoured the army’s supplies.”(2) The man laughed awkwardly. “Clearly nonsense, of course…”

This time, Crowley’s coughing fit was so bad that he had to duck into the hallway, laughing until tears beaded in the corners of his yellow eyes.

***

After the Elamite dignitary left the following day, carrying sealed orders from the King back to the puppet governor Sennacherib had installed in Elam, Crowley sat down near King after escorting Naqi’a out into the courtyard where the princes were having some sort of contest of strength involving pulling at each end of a length of rope. Naqi’a was gamely cheering Esarhaddon on, fanning herself with her hand as the sun beamed down on her elaborately coiffed hair.

Sennacherib was paying little attention to his bickering sons. All of his attention was on the bricks and limestone around them. The more the king looked at the palace walls, the more his brow furrowed. 

“Do you think the palace is ugly?” Sennacherib asked Crowley.

“Um.” Crowley pretended to hesitate over his answer. “Nah, of course not. It’s a palace.”

Sennacherib groaned. “It’s an ugly palace. I’m the King of an ugly palace.”

Vanity. The fragility of the human ego. This was the in Crowley had been looking for.

“Different standards of beauty. He was from Elam, right? So, he probably visited Babylon, before it was destroyed. They always said the palace in Babylon was the most beautiful on earth. That it had gardens even the gods would envy. He’s just used to something a bit more… green. But Babylon’s gone now, so your palace is only competing with a legend.”

Sennacherib considered this, jealousy making his mouth twist down at the corner. Competing with a legend was worse than competing with a reality. Reality could be measured and quantified. Legends grew more fantastic in remembering. “A garden,” the King said slowly, thinking. “I could create a garden…”

“Sure you could, your highness.” Crowley smiled. 

Somewhere beyond them, in the courtyard, Prince Arda-Mulissu let go of his end of the rope, sending Esarhaddon stumbling backwards into a heap of angry limbs on the ground.

***

Two years later, Sennacherib’s garden was bigger than the palace, itself. It had consumed the palace, in fact. A swathe of green seemed to cover every surface. Crowley wasn’t sure what he had expected to come out of poking the King’s sensitive ego about his building projects,(3) but the Hanging Gardens wasn’t it.

Crowley had found himself spending every bit of time that he wasn’t using to stoke rivalries among the members of the royal household with the engineers tasked with working on the palace gardens. He watched as blueprints were drawn and supplies gathered, as architects and horticulturists argued with one another, as careful measurements were taken by surveyors using plumbobs and lengths of knotted cord. Crowley was a demon who could appreciate a large-scale project. Crowley told himself that he enjoyed watching the elaborate plans being made and slowly turned into reality because it was a fun thought-exercise to find all the little ways Crowley could change one small thing to unravel it all. And that was fun, but that wasn’t why Crowley spent long hours watching the engineers argue over the problem of getting water from the Tigris River to Nineveh. It was something about the mad leaps of logic, the desperation and adrenaline of being under a deadline, that moment when an idea clicked into place and one of the engineers said, “Wait, what if we tried…”

This had spiralled into something well beyond Crowley’s initial intention to add a few more notable temptations to his infernal file before it came up for review. Crowley had gotten _invested._ He helped terrace the land around the palace, each stepped section of earth adding elevation gain, until the land seemed to be reaching up in an attempt to swallow the palace. Naqi’a had been baffled when he showed up to help mix her perfumes with traces of soil still marking his clothes. 

“I don’t understand what’s so interesting about a lot of piles of dirt.”

“It’s not the piles of dirt that are interesting,” Crowley had attempted to explain. “It’s what they are going to turn into. Look, it’s like you showing off your son’s hunting abilities and military acumen to the King. It’s a lot of small actions now, but you’re looking to the future result: your son on the throne. Me, I look at those piles of dirt and see the garden that they will be.”

Soon enough, everyone else began to, as well. Sennacherib sent out expeditions to far flung lands, and they brought back all manner of strange new plants. Soon, the terraces were lined with olives, date palms, tamarisks, and an entire orchard of pear trees. The plants rose upwards in a sharp wave of greenery, seeming to reach for the heavens.

Watering the trees was a problem. The entire royal palace staff grumbled and railed at having to haul buckets of water from the canal system. It became a favorite complaint, and the engineers struggled to solve it.

“Well, pipes. Obviously,” Crowley said, sitting down beside Achad, the foreman of the building crew.

“Obviously.” Ninos, one of the younger engineers, rolled his brown eyes expressively. “Have you ever tried to get water to flow upward through a pipe, Crowley? The pipe doesn’t magically undo the fact that water won’t flow upwards.”

Achad sighed. “I wish the King weren’t so set on this idea of making the heavens green. We could make a perfectly beautiful garden on the ground. None of this ‘turning the sky the color of envy’ business.”

Crowley shifted awkwardly. “Heh. Kings, am I right? Who _knows_ where he got the idea from…”

“It’s our heads on the line, if we can’t make it work,” Talmai, a heavy-set carpenter, complained. He tore off a hunk of bread and chewed it moodily.

Crowley winced, downing his goblet of wine in three long swallows. “Heh, too bad you couldn’t make a giant straw, and suck the water up to the top of the terraces.”

Ninos took the suggestion seriously, though, pointing out, “We’d need something to create suction. Can’t think of anything powerful enough to create that kind of force.”

“We know we need to scoop up the water, and then convey it,” Achad answered. “It’s too bad we couldn’t make the scoop move.”

“Inside the pipe?” Crowley asked.

Ninos was stirring his soup in a circle with his ladle, idly. His eyes unfocused, and then suddenly he stiffened. “What if it turned in a circle?”

“The pipe?”

“No, no. Inside the pipe. What if there were a set of scoops, like a spiral staircase, inside the pipe, and when you turned a crank, the inside scoops would turn in a spiral, upwards, like a screw! The pipe would keep the water contained, and the screw would pull it, stair by stair, up the terraces.”

The work crew stared at each other for a moment in silence, before scrambling to their feet, abandoning their half-finished meals.

“I’ve got clay pipes!”

“I can mock up a turning stair from wood; it should only take an hour or two!”

Crowley toasted their retreating backs with the jug of wine, abandoning his goblet entirely. Humans. You had to admire them, the mad buggers.

***

The water screws worked. Water was moved from terrace to terrace by means of a series of them. With the irrigation system in place, a new wonder was added. 

Crowley had spent long hours sewing with Naqi’a and Tashmetu-Sherratt, the two royal women shooting each other vicious looks over their needlework, until hundreds of sheets of sturdy linen had been sewn together to create a single cloth as long and broad as the facade of the palace. It’s length was covered with a series of small pockets. The entire crew of engineers dragged the massive sheet to the top of the palace wall. Every pocket was carefully filled with soil and spongy moss, and a bulb, beginning to sprout with vivid green leaf blades was planted. By the time the entire enterprise was finished, over a thousand individual plants had been deposited in the cloth.

Talmai oversaw the cloth being lowered down the facade of the palace, and carefully fixed into place. Within three weeks the linen was hidden by greenery, bursting out of the pockets, watered by a constant trickle of water from the last set of screws, faithfully cranked by a pair of gardeners posted at the top of the wall. The water dripped downwards, wetting the cloth and feeding the plants that grew there.

King Sennacherib took all the credit for the success of his “wonder for all peoples of the earth,” but the engineers drank, caroused, and clapped one another on the back, knowing exactly who was responsible for the creation of a garden hanging in the air.

Crowley spent the nights of spring in the pear orchard, watching thousands of star-shaped lilies gleam palely against the darkening sky, like the earth was unfolding its own perfumed constellations in competition with the heavens.

*** 

Naqi’a’s plans were finally realized, the year after the Hanging Gardens were. Sennacherib made Esarhaddon his heir, displacing his eldest son, Arda-Mulissu, from the line of succession. Crowley plaited Naqi’a’s hair with silver leaves, and got out her favorite carnelian necklace for the occasion of her son’s first state dinner as heir to the throne of the Assyrian kingdom. Arda-Mulissu sulked furiously through the entire thing, elbowing his younger brother “accidentally” as he sat down beside him.

Soon enough, it was impossible to pass the king’s chambers without hearing the raised voices of the two brother’s complaining about one another to their father. Sennacherib was looking increasingly harried.

Naqi’a, looking intimidatingly beautiful in a skirt studded with lapis lazuli beads, took the King aside one evening. The next morning, Arda-Mulissu was escorted out of the palace gates, and told to make himself scarce if he couldn’t pledge his allegiance to the heir to the throne. Arda-Mulissu had hissed curses at the guards, and at his father, swearing that the entire royal household would be sorry for their actions. 

Crowley waved lazily, breathing in the scent of sacred lilies from the top of the gate as the exiled prince stomped away. Far below him, he could hear one of the guards saying to the other, “It’s not right, sending the rightful crown prince away like that. Don’t know what the King is thinking. Must be that wife of his, bending his ear… I tell you what, if Prince Arda-Mulissu comes back, he’s got my sword sworn to his cause, eh?”

***

Several months, and one truly Hellish performance review later, Crowley packed several ripe pears into a knapsack that already contained two jars of wine. His dark hair was studded with starbursts of lilies. The shade of the orchard was cool and pleasant in the early summer. 

Suddenly, the tranquility of leaves whispering in the breeze was broken by furious shouts and screams from the direction of the Temple of the moon god, Sin. Crowley could just make out someone shouting, “It’s the prince! The exiled prince is back! Oh, gods above, what has he done?!”

Crowley slung the bag over his shoulder, and slipped quietly away. Time to leave the garden.

***  
1) It wasn’t that royal souls were worth any more of less than those of the common people, it was just that they were high profile. High profile was what Crowley was looking for, in order to draw attention away from the fact that he had spent most of the past century playing Twenty Squares with Aziraphale while sampling local vintages of wine. Crowley wasn’t sure how it was possible, but the angel seemed to actually get better at the board game, the more blitzed he got.  
2) Aziraphale had been quite pleased with that bit of work. The mice had also been quite pleased, but had wished that the army’s supply officers had packed a bit more cheese.  
3) Other than something good (bad) to put into his report to Hell. They liked humans building absurd monuments to their own egos quite a bit, Below. Babel had been very popular with the lower-downs.


End file.
